Motors, Murders and Mugabe: A Car Crash Or a Conspiracy to Kill?

Keith Somerville [1] is a lecturer in journalism at the School of Arts, Brunel University in Uxbridge, near London. Somerville was executive producer for the BBC’s international award-winning Legal Online course and co-authored the BBC’s Scoops and Stories course. Somerville also was in charge of the BBC’s interactive journalism teaching tool, The Journalism Tutor.

It was a long straight road with few bends and the occasional hill. There were potholes in the road, but by rural African standards it wasn’t bad. There was a lane in each direction and a flattish dirt strip and then a storm drain on each side.

It was hot. We’d been driving for two hours on the long, dusty strip between Hwange National Park and Victoria Falls in southwestern Zimbabwe. Liz was at the wheel, and we’d been stuck behind a big lorry for several miles. There was no other traffic behind us, ahead of him or coming in the other direction. Normally, drivers will pull over to let you pass without you having to accelerate on to the dirt strip. This guy wouldn’t. Liz dropped back, checked for no oncoming traffic and moved to the oncoming lane and started overtaking. Far from giving us room, the lorry pushed out into the lane we were using. Liz braked and swerved, we hit the dirt strip, slid fast and frighteningly into the storm drain and Liz brought us safely to a halt a foot in front of a huge boulder blocking the drain.

A couple of years earlier, I was driving in Lake McIlwaine just outside Harare. The road was narrow and fringed on both sides with tall grass, well above the roof of the car. I was doing about 20 mph. As I came round a bend, so did a Zimbabwean family in their car. We smashed head on. I smacked into the windscreen and cracked it but miraculously ended with just an egg-sized lump on my temple and a sore head. No fractured skull.

What does this demonstrate, other than that I’m a hard-headed journalist and that I’ve escaped from a couple of car crashes in Zimbabwe?

It demonstrates that driving in Zimbabwe can be dangerous. Long, straight roads encourage speed, but lorry drivers can be as malicious, stupid or as overtired as the world over. They drive hundreds of miles a day on long roads, with heat haze rising from the road, goats wandering into their paths and with little to keep them awake.

Ok, so why am I writing this piece rather than doing a road guide in Lonely Planet?

Because of the car crash on March 6 in Zimbabwe that killed Susan Tsvangirai and injured her husband, Morgan. Tsvangirai is the fierce opponent and reluctant coalition partner of Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has been leader of Zimbabwe’s government for the past 29 years and is a man not known for his forgiving or gentle approach to dealing with opposition. Mugabe has been forced into an uneasy and unstable coalition with Tsvangirai by domestic and international pressure after clearly dishonest elections last year.

Soon after the news of the crash emerged, questions started being asked in the world’s media about the possibility that this wasn’t just an accident but an attempt to kill Tsvangirai. London’s Sunday Telegraph [2] had this headline on its Web site: “Fatal Tsvangirai crash 'was not accident,’ says MDC.” The story goes on to report suspicions in Tsvangirai’s Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) party that this was a “botched assassination attempt.” The BBC News Online site had a story about the rumours flying around that this was not a simple accident.

Morgan Tsvangirai himself, on returning to Zimbabwe from hospital treatment in Botswana (there because he presumably felt unsafe in a Zimbabwean hospital – the London Times referred to him being “spirited away” because of fears of an assassination attempt) said he thought there was only a “one in a thousand” chance that this was not an accident.

Unfortunately, Robert Mugabe made things worse by his comment at Susan Tsvangirai’s funeral that the accident had been “the hand of God” at work. Given his God-like view of his abilities and importance and the adulation he receives from his supporters, whose hand, which God?

Despite Tsvangirai’s words, collateral is given to the assassination theory by the surprising numbers of unexplained deaths of leading politicians in Zimbabwe during the past 30 years. Those who died could all be seen as critics of or threats to Mugabe’s supremacy ever since the months before the 1980 election that brought him to power.

The first to go was Josiah Tongogara – he was commander of ZANLA, the military wing of Mugabe’s ZANU party. He died on Christmas Day 1979, six days after the signing of the Lancaster House agreement, which ended the liberation war and set the scene for the 1980 one-man, one-vote election. A mysterious car crash killed one of the most powerful men in Zimbabwe at a time when he would have been in a strong position to be a possible successor to – or even challenger to – Mugabe’s leadership.

Others who died in “accidents” on Zimbabwe’s hazardous roads include former deputy defence minister and war-time head of operations of ZANLA William Ndangana. He died in a crash after offering a lift to ZANU dissident and Mugabe opponent Edgar Tekere. In August 1994, Sidney Malunga, a fiercely independent ZANU member, died in an unexplained crash. Others died in mysterious ways: former ZANLA deputy commander Lookout Masuku from a serious but unexplained illness after being released from detention by Mugabe; Maurice Nyagumbo allegedly committed suicide after a corruption scandal; Mugabe’s own brother Albert died in his own swimming pool under circumstances still to be explained and was replaced as head of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trades Unions by … Morgan Tsvangirai. I could list more.

So, how as journalists do we treat the Tsvangirai accident? I know from my own painful experience the dangers of driving on Zimbabwe’s roads. Crashes are frequent, fatalities far higher than in the USA or Europe. Roads are poorly maintained, vehicles even more poorly maintained and lorry drivers, in particular, poorly trained, over-worked and frequently drunk.

So was this tragic event a horrible coincidence? Tsvangirai finally achieves some power to change things and seriously challenge Mugabe and then as he travels from Harare to his home has an accident.

Or is this too easy an answer? Mugabe and his ZANU supporters have proved all too ready to use violence, intimidation and murder to defend or extend their hold on power. His opponents have a distressing habit of being involved in accidents, of dying from unexplained illnesses or of committing suicide unexpectedly.

This is a real dilemma for journalists covering political leaders like Mugabe and countries in civil torment like Zimbabwe. It’s easy to jump hastily either way – “It’s Mugabe, so it must be murder,” or “Oh God, more conspiracy theories - after all, accidents happen, even in Zimbabwe.”

So my answer is - don’t jump. Stay still, consider the possibilities. Report the facts you can verify. Report in as balanced a way possible what the contending sides are saying. Give the context, even if this does feel like you are implicitly speculating – and clearly in this examination of how to cover such stories I am speculating and putting the conspiracy theory into people’s minds. But don’t jump to hasty conclusions and make sure you get the chronology of events and the history of – for example, Mugabe’s use of violence – right.

We are not judge and jury. We should also think back to Saddam and WMD. There is no doubting the evil that Saddam perpetrated within Iraq and his barbarity toward the Kurds during the long-running war against Iran and in the invasion of Kuwait. But you couldn’t extrapolate from that and decide on the basis of no other firm evidence that he must have WMD and was therefore an international threat. But much of the U.S., British and international media did just that, even if they still didn’t support the war.

Regarding Robert Mugabe: In the late ‘70s, he was the little-known, pro-Chinese guerrilla (or terrorist, if you were from the right-wing press) leader. When he won the 1980 election and preached reconciliation, he was suddenly Comrade Bob. It all changed when he had the temerity to take back farmland from rich, racist white farmers who had taken over the farms when they were stolen from black Zimbabweans at the point of a gun. But he didn’t reclaim the land in a legal, ordered or humane way. He used violence, intimidation, and he did it all not to redistribute land but to steal a march on the increasingly powerful opposition. He gave land to his cronies and rewarded the young, mainly urban unemployed who had seized the land. From then on, his policies became increasingly erratic and violent, but the press coverage in Britain, in particular, became rabid and Mugabe could then be accused of anything with impunity.

So he might have been involved in the crash, but more likely, he wasn’t, and it was a terrible accident. So, I ask again, what do you do in reporting the story?

When you don’t know something, be honest to your audience and say, “these are the possibilities, but we don’t know everything.” Maybe we can’t write that sexy headline or feel we are using the press to fight repression. But we are here to inform and educate, not to reinforce stereotypes (however we may feel they are deserved) and peddle speculation.